Update in West Virginia
March 22, 2010
The New York Times ran an editorial last week praising West Virginia’s state legislature for adopting a pilot plan providing for voluntary public financing of state Supreme Court races. The Times believes hard-hit West Virginia taxpayers should foot the bill for these campaigns because “judicial neutrality and the appearance of neutrality is under severe threat across the country….”
States already have more than adequate power to discipline or remove judges who, by selling rulings for campaign cash, are truly a real threat to “judicial neutrality.” Such corrupt judges can be dealt with quite effectively through statutes, rules, bar codes, etc. So all we’re really left with is an “appearance” of a problem – unless the Times is sitting on some blockbuster story about mass numbers of state judges trading their judicial decisions for campaign contributions.
Strangely enough, the Times’ moral righteousness didn’t prevent the paper from endorsing the man who, for all practical purposes, destroyed public financing of presidential campaigns: Barack Obama.